Forestry

Woodland owners and others are invited to apply for training with the Maryland Cooperative Extension Service and Ruffled Grouse Society as "Coverts Cooperators."The free, three-day seminar in September focuses on general forestry and wildlife management principles. In return for the training, reference materials and follow-up seminars, the trainees will develop a management plan for their woodland, and they will commit a year during which they are to share information with neighbors and their communities.

NEW KENT, Va. - Like a magician swirling back his cape to reveal a surprise, Phil West plucked a piece of fabric from the stuffed animal, let students have a peek, then covered it again.The Game and Inland Fisheries staffer led the group to another prop, lifted its covering briefly, then dropped it back in place.The students had to identify the animals - a bobcat and a quail - as part of a test on wildlife they took recently during Envirothon 1997 at the New Kent Forestry Center.Working in teams of 5About 40 high school students, working in teams of five, tested their knowledge of wildlife, pesticides, forestry, aquatics and soils.

Most people of a gambling nature wouldn't make a bet that required 40 years to learn if there's a payoff.Weyerhaeuser Co. did.In 1966, the company decided to convert its timberlands in the Pacific Northwest and the South to a then-untested concept known as "high-yield forestry." The idea was to manage trees much like an agricultural crop, and not to leave forests to nature and chance."Thirty years later, we're beginning to see these stands in their more mature form and what they're going to look like," said William Corbin, Weyerhaeuser's executive vice president for timberlands and distribution.

Thomas O. Tyler III, a commercial forester who earned a reputation for balancing the demands of business and environmentalists, died Monday of cancer at his home in Vienna on the Eastern Shore. He was 55.In 1966, he abandoned an apprenticeship in bricklaying and became a forest technician for Chesapeake Corp. of Virginia, a paper manufacturer. At his death, he was regional forester for the Woodlands Division of Chesapeake Forest Products, a subsidiary which owns and manages some 330,000 acres of timberland in Maryland.

LAST WEEK in this column I reported on the winner of the Carroll County Forestry Board's annual Arbor Day Poster Contest. The winning class was Penny Segessenman's third-grade class at Charles Carroll Elementary.What I didn't know last week is that the winning poster was not designed by the whole class, but by student Zach Bair. Many of Segessenman's students designed entries. Then the class voted on the one that would represent it. Zach's poster was the winner and went on to take top honors from all the posters submitted by first- through fifth-grade classes countywide.

Al Capone's weeping cherry tree drapes a stunning canopy of pink in front of Union Memorial Hospital each spring, attracting arbor ardor from all who see it in bloom.Less celebrated, but no less spectacular, is a monument almost no one sees: a mammoth "Tree of Heaven" behind a derelict rowhouse in the 200 block of South Carey Street, one of those wild junk trees that sprout between cracks in concrete and push up through the floors of abandoned houses. It's a giant Ailanthus soaring nearly 60 feet on a trunk more than 15 feet around, according to its entry in the city's 1995 Notable Tree Commission registry.

The Carroll County Farm Service Agency reminds landowners that all foreign people who have bought or sold agricultural land in Maryland are required to report the transaction to the agency within 90 days.To avoid federal penalties and fines, foreign owners of U.S. agricultural land must report their holdings, acquisitions, dispositions, leases of 10 years or more and land-use changes."The report is required by the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, which is still in effect," said Kelly Hereth, county executive director.

Thomas Dudley Cabot, 98, millionaire industrialist, public servant, conservationist and philanthropist, died Thursday in Weston, Mass. He started working for Cabot Corp., founded by his father in 1882, and built it into the world's largest producer of carbon black, used in printing ink, paint and automobile tires. He bought uninhabited islands off Maine to preserve them and donated a 176-acre forest in New Hampshire to the New England Forestry Foundation. He was director of international affairs for the State Department under President Harry S. Truman in 1951.

Paul Horine Seward, a retired state forestry official and Harford County Civil Defense official, died Monday of a brain tumor at his dairy farm on Stepney Road near Aberdeen. He was 84.Mr. Seward began his forestry career in 1930 when Gov. Albert C. Ritchie appointed him warden to the old Maryland Forest Service, now the State Forest and Park Service under the auspices of the Department of Natural Resources. He retired in 1977 as assistant to the agency's director.As a young warden, he was influenced by Fred Beasley, the state's first forester, who was an outspoken critic of the practice then of burning forests, which resulted in erosion and other environmental damage, and who advocated reforestation and the planting of more trees throughout the state.

Dry conditions caused by a lack of significant rainfall have caused an increase in the number of brush and forest fires in the state, including a blaze that burned more than 20 acres of woodland Friday near Prettyboy Reservoir.The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has no immediate plans to reinstate the burning ban it imposed statewide for six days this month, said spokesman Bob Graham. But state forestry officials were concerned that windy conditions this weekend might turn some activities, such as lighting a charcoal barbecue, into fire hazards.